Peterborough City Centre now live with gigabit speed connectivity

The first businesses and public sites are now connected to the new Peterborough CORE pure fibre network, as construction in the City Centre is now complete. Today (5 August), the Eco Innovation Centre (EIC) on City Road was the first commercial building to connect to the Peterborough CORE through local service provider, Businesscoms. Tenant businesses will now join existing public sector sites live with ultra-fast, gigabit speed internet access. Cllr Marco Cereste, Leader of Peterborough City Council, spoke at an event today at the EIC to mark the official ‘lighting’ of gigabit speed services in the City Centre: “This is an exciting day for the city and an important milestone in Peterborough’s transformation into a Gigabit City. I’m delighted to see our vision becoming a reality and the local community already seeing the benefits. “The three priorities for the council are improving the prosperity of this city, the quality of life and education of our residents. I believe this investment will help us to achieve all three. Businesses will all benefit from faster broadband speeds making the world a much smaller place to do business, workers will be able to access information faster than ever before improving productivity and the skills and knowledge of our workforce. “This new future-proof digital infrastructure will support the city’s growth and development and I look forward to the many exciting developments still to come.” At the event, infrastructure provider, CityFibre, officially handed all contracted public sites in the city centre over to Peterborough City Council’s internet service provider, Serco, ready to go live. Gigabit connectivity is now live in ten of the Council’s public buildings, such as the Town Hall, Bayard Place, Central Library and the CCTV Office, with more to follow throughout the city. Sandip Unalkat, Senior Project Manager at Serco, said, “It’s been a tremendous achievement from the whole project team to get to this stage so quickly. “It is great to see the benefits already reaching our customers, who can now appreciate the boost in performance and increased efficiencies the project promised to deliver. We now look forward to making the next stage just as successful.” Andy Starnes, City Development Manager at CityFibre, said, “We’re thrilled to have reached this significant point in the project and are very grateful for all the hard work from the team and our partners to get to this stage. “We’re now moving swiftly on to the next stage of construction, east and south of the centre, with businesses lining up to connect along the way. We will soon be launching activity to help business parks throughout the city get connected and we encourage any businesses who haven’t already registered to do so as soon as possible.”